


Cathedrals

by punkwarren (snakejolras)



Category: Graceland (TV)
Genre: Emetophobia, Gen, death mentions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-17
Updated: 2015-04-17
Packaged: 2018-03-23 09:31:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3763063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snakejolras/pseuds/punkwarren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mike thinks maybe, as he dies alone and feels himself go, maybe he’ll see something. He wakes up and all he sees is harshness, is the coldness of the room and the heat of life rising back up. At first he wonders if that’s all he gets. If life is made in God’s image than maybe all you get in Heaven is another hospital bed and a craving for Hell.</p>
<p>{a slight sequel to a series of rooms}</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cathedrals

He looks for proof of God everywhere, because he has never been able to see it in himself. When he was younger he would stare at the pictures of angels and saints, he would try to find it in the pictures, as if there was an intricate structure that if looked at the right angle, would show you what God looks like. It didn’t take long for him to understand that that didn’t work, that there was nothing there but stained glass and a notion. He had to look for a higher power elsewhere, in words from his grandmother’s lips and well placed intentions.

 

Mike thinks maybe, as he dies alone and feels himself go, maybe he’ll see something. He wakes up and all he sees is harshness, is the coldness of the room and the heat of life rising back up. At first he wonders if that’s all he gets. If life is made in God’s image than maybe all you get in Heaven is another hospital bed and a craving for Hell. It passes, and he remembers little else until he’s in Mexico, a prisoner to his own ambition. The first thing he remembers next is the heat of his own body feeling misplaced against the sweltering heat that the desert is already providing. He remembers puking his guts out into maybe the grossest toilet he’s ever seen, and the pounding in his head in sync with the flexing of his fingers.

 

He looks at himself in the mirror and laughs in some mix of pain and exhaustion. He slips down to rest his head on the ground, and he makes his first altar, his cathedral, while his entire body is pounding and feels like it’s in the wrong place. He doesn’t feel anything yet but he tries, and he constructs what he can.

 

His next cathedral is a stolen 1977 Ford, that feels only slightly better than the motel did. He can make something out of it, make something that feels like his and not like he’s visiting. His altar is a dashboard full of notes, full of doodles and empty bottles, his altar is a blanket he finds in the trunk that he clings to in the passenger seat at 3 am when he pretends he’s able to sleep. He doesn’t feel God but he feels himself, which is more than he’s had recently. He understands that some part of his deepest core is survival, that he is used to making it feel like his skin because he has been forced to. The minute another car goes by he jumps, knocking a few of the bottles off the dashboard. He scrambles to put them back, as if he needs to keep his candles in place.

 

The third cathedral he makes is a fist, the taste of iron in his mouth that tastes like air to a drowning man. It’s nothing to do with the things he’s running from, just something he starts in a bar off the road, something he wants on one of his bad days to prove that he’s really there. His altar is a sink with scarlet dripping down it, it’s cold water down his face that numbs him, that numbs everything around him, that numbs Heaven and Hell.

 

He looks into the mirror and it becomes confession:

 

When was your last confession? On the near end of never, on the close side of _what have you done for me lately?_ It didn’t take him long out of the hospital to notice the Saint Christopher pendant around his neck was gone, along with the rest of him. Safe travel? Hardly. He was doing just fine without out him, or well, just as badly as he already was.

 

What would you like to confess? Everything. Every goddamn thing he could ever think of that he had ever done but he wasn’t sure God had that much time. Instead he bleeds more into the sink, like that says it all the same.

  
He gets another pendant the next day, but it isn’t Saint Christopher, it’s Saint Jude. _Patron saint of lost causes._ That one might actually do him some good. 


End file.
